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Monday, February 20, 2012

Sorority

Last week, I had a milestone.

It hit me while I was in the tub,
mulling over TWM's journal entry.* I was thinking about how he
mentions in his story how much I resisted teaching him anything about
witchcraft or involving him in any working or ritual. That's a story
for another post, but now, here was my little buddy, all grown up and
reflecting on his early witchy days. It made me think back to my own
beginnings and how far I've come.

From the days when my spiritual
knowledge amounted to, 'don't set your hair on fire while lighting
the Goddess candle,' I am now confident in my ability to write a
multi-participant ritual from beginning to end, and lead it if need
be.** From the days when I preached a brand of Wicca I had copied
word-for-word from an introductory website, I now find myself more
and more deconstructing accepted tenants of belief and asking myself
why I believe them and what
that belief means to me and my daily life. From days when I wore a
teensy, tiny pentacle on a chain long enough to hide under my shirt
and spent half my time staring at my chest to be sure my little charm
was safely hidden between Bennie and June, I am now open about my
faith with my family, my friends, my boyfriend, my colleagues, my
classmates, the entirety of the internet, and anyone on the street
who asks. From the days when I lit candles and asked for things, now
I light candles and listen and feel and be. Point is, at this moment
in my life, I know I am still just barely on the upward slant of my
learning curve, but I have grown up.

In
Smalltown, USA, I was raised agnostic. No one ever sat me down and
said, “Look, God's probably not real,” but when other families
were saying grace over dinner, my parents were trading anecdotes
about whatever wacky thing the Christian babysitter had said that
day. We never talk about religion or our own personal faith,
although probability says that out of the whole damn dozen of us, I
can't be the only believer. I didn't see the inside of a church
until I was in high school. And while I didn't get kicked out of
Vacation Bible School (ahem, Nuwanda, coughcough), I had such a hard
time not giggling through the inspirational songs on the first day
that I knew I could never go back. Religion was a shill, a crutch
for the naïve.

Well.

The
cynicism has lasted me well into adult life, but I did began to
notice a spiritual bankruptcy in my life, and false start after false
start, I eventually found my way into witchcraft. And when I did
find my new path, the first people who knew about it were my friends,
followed by my mother, then eventually the rest of my family.
Although it's not a frequent occurrence, I've had serious
conversations about my faith with my atheist brother and father,
burned sage with my Jesus-email-forwarding stepmom, and had very
long, very drunk conversations with my mom about exactly how many
goats will be present for sacrifice at my wedding.*** The one thing
I have never done is EVER mentioned my religion to either of my
sisters, let alone talked about it at any sort of length. I know
they're both aware of what I do; in my family, rumor and gossip
passes osmotically from person to person like the Deadly Motaba
Virus, so once that shit was out of the bag, I always assumed it was
out of the bag in a big way. But since one of my neurotic fears is
unwittingly turning into an attention whore, I don't run around
going, “Hey, sis! Have you heard I'm a witch? Guess what's up in
my witchety witch life lately?!” The topic has never come up.

And
honestly, I was glad, and I'll tell you why, albeit a little
shame-facedly. I was glad not to talk religion with my sisters
because I, public pagan, founder of clubs, waver of athames, reader
of Tarot cards, corrupter of precocious minor witchlets, was afraid
of what they'd think. Having “the Talk” with my science-minded,
physics-spewing boyfriend had been scary enough, and in fact, I'd put
it off for a long time because I knew my heart would break if he
laughed at me. But my sisters? Couldn't do it. Wouldn't and
didn't.

Nuwanda
and I often trade tales of hard times and social inequities, and when
in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, we'll tell each other, “Just
think, WWCD? What would C. (my younger sister) do?” This is
because C. is the toughest woman I know. She takes no shit. She
lets no one push her around, keep her down, make her feel bad about
herself. She is the walking goddess of not giving a single fuck, and
if one day I can be as self-assured and capable as she is, I will die
happy.

On the
other hand, my older sister was my first roommate, my first rival, my
first friend, and my first idol. She is my best friend to this day.
I followed her around from kindergarten till graduation as often as
she'd let me. A large part of my self-esteem is built on the fact
that she thinks I'm funny. Once, after a play I was in, she told me
she'd forgotten it was me on the stage, and I still hold that
compliment as the dearest one I've ever received. I love her. I
respect her. And because of that, I feared her scorn.

Which
brings me around to my milestone. Last week, my older sister and her
boyfriend came to see a show.**** They crashed in my living room, a
corner of which is devoted to my altar and library. Every time she
has come to visit, my sister has walked back and forth past that
altar with barely a second glance. The only comment either of us has
ever made about it was when she asked, “Can I put my earrings here
tonight?” and I said, “Yeah, sure.”

Last
week, out of the blue, my sister took a look at the altar and asked
hesitantly, “So... Does all this stuff mean something, or do you
just like the way it looks?”

And
for a second, even though it's Witchcraft 101, even though I had
explained the set-up on numerous occasions, even though it was my
freaking altar for fuck's sake, I couldn't answer because I honestly
didn't know how.

Finally,
I told her that it all meant something, and she replied that she'd
always wondered, but had been too afraid of offending me to ask. To
which I replied with my greatest, stupidest fear:

“I
never mentioned it before. I was afraid you'd laugh because you think
religion is stupid.”

She
reminded me that she thinks organized
religion is stupid, and I showed her the pentacle my Frog Hollow
Coven girls had made for me, the silver apple stuffed with rose
petals, the incense burner (which she recognized, having spotted me
15 bucks in New Orleans to purchase it), and pointed out that there
was a symbol for each of the four compass points.

Then
we went to Denny's. And that was the end of the conversation I'd
been dreading for five years.

Was I
unfair to my sister in thinking she'd be too cynical to accept the
choices I'd made as valid? Yes. Was it wrong to assume she'd
immediately put aside her affection and our friendship because I was
dumb enough to believe in not just one god, but multiple aspects of
deity? Yes. Had I been selling her short for years because I was
chickenshit? Yes.

In the
end, did it make any difference? No.

Not on
the surface anyway. Not in the sense that now everything has changed
and our relationship will never be the same and blah blah blah. Not
in the way I feared.

But
was a big deal? Yes. The biggest, best deal in a long time.

*I don't always think of underage boys
in the tub, but when I do please forget I ever started that sentence.
Christ.

**Although I get weirdly high right
before grounding and have to be ear-flicked to quiet the giggling.

***One hundred and eight. One for
every pre-marital lover.

****If you love musical asskickery, you
will love Sirsy. Get on iTunes this minute, and follow it up with
Ticketmaster, cuz that's some shit you need to see for yourself.

1 comment:

As much as I love your sisters, it is you that gets to be my hero. Some people are easier to tell then others. They just are. There are a lot of people I still need to tell in my life. And the ones I fear losing the most are my three "sisters" from college. Thank you for making me a little braver then before :)